Gibbon Pass (Alberta)

Gibbon helped to introduce people living in Canada to each other, and to themselves, as Canadians.

We’re going approximately four kilometers outside of our self-imposed geographic boundaries this week, over onto the other side of the continental divide into Alberta, with Gibbon Pass. This one is worth it – even if you are unfamiliar with the name John Murray Gibbon, chances are you’ve brushed alongside his influence. And even if Gibbon Pass is technically over in Alberta, he had a strong Valley connection!

John Murray Gibbon

John Murray Gibbon was born 12 April 1875 in Ceylon to William Duff Gibbon and Katharine G Murray, his father having decided to move from Scotland to have a go making his fortune with a tea plantation.¹ Gibbon spent most of his childhood in Scotland, however, as by 1881 at age five he was living with his mother and four of his siblings in the parish of Old Machar on the outskirts of Aberdeen.²

They were still there ten years later at the time of the 1891 census,³ after which John Murray soon attended the University of Aberdeen. He then wrote entrance examinations, in 1894, to Oxford as part of a competition for a scholarship open to those with low private income.⁴ He got in, and at Oxford he continued his interest in studying language, art, literature and poetry.

During these Oxford years time, Gibbon spent summers in Germany, where he became increasingly interested in German folk culture, particularly song. Gibbon was drawn to romantic ideas at the time that the Golden Age of mankind lay in the the past and needed to be reclaimed, with that idealized past being encapsulated by the folk traditions of a nation’s people. These traditions were considered valuable assets to be collected, preserved, and practiced.⁵ Put a pin in this – it will become relevant.

In 1900, Gibbon married Anne Fox, a fellow English scholar whom he had met in Germany, and the two would go on to have four children.⁶ At the time, Gibbon worked in publishing in England, but in 1907 he got a tip from the cousin of a friend that the Canadian Pacific Railway was looking for a European advertising representative who could head up a foreign language tourist and immigration campaign.⁷ Gibbon interviewed for the position, and on 1 May 1907 began work for the CPR: he would stay with the company until his retirement.

Early Years with the CPR

This roll as advertising agent of the CPR in Europe was a new one: strange as it seems, up until this time the CPR did not have anything approaching an advertising department. Over in Canada, they had a company journalist (George Henry Ham), whose job it was to accompany and entertain guests and other journalists, but by and large the CPR relied on these visitors to then go home to write their own articles, which would then introduce their readers to the company and to Canada. This was not a very good way of controlling the message.

The executive leadership of the CPR, meanwhile, did their best to promote the company, amongst their other responsibilities, but as the company’s reach grew, this simply became too large a task. Immigration to the prairies exploded in the early 1900s, and the CPR realized that they needed someone dedicated solely to presenting a positive image of both Canada and the CPR to the European public. Gibbon was that person.

One of Gibbon’s first assignments brought him to Canada, with his being tasked to escort a group of twelve British newspaper editors to Canada on a complimentary tour. Once across the ocean, Gibbon ended up accompanying those journalists across the country and, on his return from the West Coast, he meandered through the West Kootenays and the prairies. Travelling through the young country, he developed a deep interest in the social history with its many different peoples and different traditions.⁸ Gibbon fell in love with Canada that trip, and would go on to take an “educational” trip to Canada every summer following.

Meanwhile, in Europe, Gibbon oversaw the production of immigration propaganda: posters, magazine advertising, and tour literature, translated into various languages and painting Canada as a productive, welcoming place (and definitely not a frozen wasteland).⁹

This c.1920 propaganda poster from the CPR was produced under J.M. Gibbon’s leadership.

A Valley Connection

In his work with the company, in the winter of 1909/10 Gibbon was brought into a London office of the company to meet Robert Randolph Bruce, another former Aberdeen boy. Bruce was there promoting his orchard scheme, the Columbia Valley Irrigated Fruit Lands company, based on the Toby Benches just outside of Wilmer, and Bruce challenged Gibbon to visit him in the Windermere Valley on his next trip.¹⁰

Gibbon took him up on the offer, and in 1910 travelled to Canada with his Oxford friend Robert Ernest Vernède. In the midst of that trip, Gibbon and Vernède stayed for a time with Bruce in Wilmer, where they were shown the fledgling townsite of Invermere, then in the very early stages of development, and went on an overnight trail ride up Horsethief Creek with Thomas Starbird.¹¹ Vernède conveniently published a book including descriptions of these experiences, which can be found here.

During his short stay in the valley, Gibbon was convinced to purchase one of the CVIF’s farm lots, located near to Toby Creek on the road to Wilmer.¹² This was Lot 10, a property that would later be expanded to include Lot 11, 12 and the southern half of Lot 27, and it would tie Gibbon to the Windermere Valley for decades.

A 1910 map of the Columbia Valley Irrigated Fruit Lands properties, with the Gibbon ranch marked. The black line marking the bottom is Toby Creek, while the Wilmer townsite is to the north at the top. Map adapted from the Provincial Archives of BC, with this version found in Cole Harris and Elizabeth Phillips, eds., Letters from Windermere, 1912-1914 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1984)

There is some disagreement in sources as to what Gibbon intended to do with this property. One later source paints him as being at a bit of a loss when, the following summer, he once again visited the Valley and this time got to talking with Edward Mallandaine Jr.. Mallandaine was then the manager of the CVIF, but he was also an architect, and he suggested to Gibbon some designs for a farm house to suit the lot. Gibbon agreed, and when he ran into Mallandaine again that winter in England, he was informed that the farm house had been built as part of a model farm to help sell lots. He was also then told that a suitable tenant for the property had been found to look after the property – Harry and Amy Louisa Peters.¹³

This image, of Gibbon bumbling his way into becoming an absentee landlord of a BC model farm, does the man some injustice – as the European Advertising agent, he was likely far more involved in setting up his property as a model farm than this. Furthermore, Amy Peters recalls later that their being chosen as tenants on the property came after Gibbon himself started looking for applicants.¹⁴

Regardless, the Peters family arrived in Canada in March 1912 to take over the Gibbon property. The farm was named Cydervale, and with the Peters’ help it was turned into a vibrant estate with a manager’s home and farm buildings, three orchards, large vegetable gardens, acres of potatoes, and hay fields.¹⁵ We’ll be looking more at the Peters family and the farm in the next post.

An artist’s rendition of Cyder Dale [sic] in a promotional pamphlet, c1912. Canadian Pacific Railway Company Ltd, Windermere, B.C. (London: Canadian Pacific Land Department).

The model farm of Cydervale, in later years. Windermere Valley Museum and Archives, A1271.

An Influential Career Move

Gibbon, meanwhile, was continuing to move along in his career with the CPR. In 1913 the president of the company, Sir Thomas Shaughnessy, decided that all of the advertising for the company should be consolidated, and he wanted the person put in charge of things to be familiar with both Canadian and European operations. Naturally, he head-hunted John Murray Gibbon, offering him the newly created position of General Publicity Agent based out of Montréal.¹⁶ Gibbon accepted the position, and he moved his family to Canada.

It was Gibbon’s new job to promote the CPR worldwide, and to say that he succeeded in his assignment is an understatement. When he walked into the Montreal offices in 1913 he was starting an advertising agency from the ground up: by the late 1930s the CPR Publicity Department had four sections, including Advertising, a Press Bureau, the Photography Department and an Art Department, with staff around the world and together responsible for distributing over one and a half million copies of various CP publications.¹⁷ Under Gibbon, the CPR became recognized as a global transportation company.

The phrase “Canadian Pacific Spans the World” became central to CPR advertising, while advertising posters of a similar style to this were used up until 1930. c.1923 lithograph poster from Bernard Gribble, Eyre and Spottiswoode Ltd (London).

Promoting Canada to the World

Canada also grew as a tourist destination under Gibbon’s watch. When he started promoting the CPR, the country of “Canada” was still largely unknown, and so to sell the Company Gibbon first had to sell the country. Either people had never heard of Canada, or what they knew of Canada was limited to it being a frozen wasteland.¹⁸

So those outside of Canada often had limited knowledge of the country, but heavy immigration from the start of the century also meant that even “Canadians” generally lacked any broader understanding or connection to the nation’s cultural identity. They were disparate groups. In the case of newcomers, their understanding was limited to their own cultural heritage, while in longer settled areas, a feeling of identity was limited to a particular (discrete) geographical area. Gibbon could hardly expect tourists to come away with a particularly strong positive impression of the country when even its residents didn’t have one.¹⁹

And so, after 1918, to promote the CPR Gibbon began to promote Canada itself, both to tourists and to residents, focusing especially on its diverse cultural traditions.²⁰ In a fascinating stroke of brilliance, he did this through the arts.^*

Visually speaking, the CPR soon became a leading patron of Canadian artists, paying top dollar for striking and unique advertising posters that appeared around the world.²¹ Every CPR cruise needed its share of posters, and this became the golden age for poster production – chances are you have seen at least one of these, literally painting parts of Canada as a luxurious destination. There were opulent hotels in Ontario and Québec, and sublime alpine scenery out West. These images served not only to attract visitors, but also to translate Canada to Canadians.^{22 **}

Many of the advertising posters produced by the CPR under J.M. Gibbon’s management have become iconic. Fancy a visit to Lake Louise? A friendly Mountie just might pass by on his horse. Kenneth Shoesmith, lithograph S.C. Allen and Co. London, c.1930.

A 1925 CPR poster encouraging travel through the Canadian Rockies. Library and Archives Canada
Acc. No. 1990-106-7

The CPR’s Royal York Hotel in Toronto appears as the height of luxury in this 1929 poster.

Gibbon didn’t limit his influence to the visual, either. Concerned that Canada’s writing talent was going to the United States due to a lack of recognition in Canada,²³ he co-founded and became president of the Canadian Authors Association in 1921, aimed at promoting wider distribution and reading of books by Canadian authors in Canada.²⁴

Gibbon was an author himself, having published his first book titled Scots in Canada in 1911, and he would go on to author the first comprehensive history of the CPR, The Steel of Empire in 1935 (amongst many other titles). In his own words, encouraging Canadian authorship in 1918, ““There never was a country so rich in material for the imaginative writer as this great northern Dominion, half high romance and half high finance…””²⁵ In his view, there was plenty of interest in Canada to take inspiration from: authors only needed to be encouraged and supported by Canadian publishing houses to do so.

John Murray Gibbon (right) along with local Robert Randolph Bruce, and Canadian poet Bliss Carmen. Carmen lived most of his life in the US, but with encouragement and support from Gibbon, was increasingly recognized and supported in his native country. This photo was likely taken around the time of the opening of the David Thompson Memorial Fort in summer 1922, which Carmen attended. Windermere Valley Museum and Archives, A1208.

Also something of a song-smith, Gibbon partnered with a music arranger to publish song-sheets and songbooks, often taking familiar tunes and rewriting them with lyrics specific to particular Canadian features. In this vein, the short songbook “Ballads of B.C.” features such toe tapping numbers as “Song of the Columbia River” and “A Ballad of the Kootenay” (both set to different Irish tunes). Broader collections of a similar type included (among others), Canadian Folksongs (old and new) (1927), and two volumes of Northland Songs (1936, 1938).

One of John Murray Gibbon’s many songbooks, “Ballads of B.C.”, can be found at the Windermere Valley Museum and Archives.

Then there were the festivals. In 1927, Gibbon was tasked with organizing an event to kick off the tourist season at the Chateau Frontenac. The result was a four day festival celebrating French Canadian culture, complete with song and dance, and it was so successful that the CPR went on the sponsor sixteen additional folk and handicraft festivals across the country. These included Banff Highland Days, held for five years starting in 1927, as well as gatherings in Victoria, Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg, and Toronto.

Here is where Gibbon’s Romantic thought really broke through, as while the “Folk” celebrated at these events were very much idealized, by celebrating different ethnic groups in different ways, Gibbon encouraged a national interest in these differences, and in doing so help to create a unified image of Canada and what it meant to be Canadian. There were differences between communities, sure, but as these festivals celebrated these differences, they were made less scary.²⁶ Gibbon turned what was seen as a weakness into a strength.

As described in a newspaper article at the time, “Mr. Gibbon does not believe in the “standardized” citizen, holding that Canada has been immeasurably enriched by the wealth of tradition brought into the country by fellow country men of diverse racial origins. Tolerance and understanding, based on sympathetic knowledge of New and Old Canadians, will solve the problem of national unity.”²⁷

In other words, with such a variety of cultural groups across the country, Gibbon imposed a theoretical order on the disorder of the young country by establishing a cultural identity of Canada as a “mosaic”. This image, of Canada as a unified, multicultural country, became central to how Gibbon presented the country to the world, but it also changed citizens’ impressions of the country from within.²⁸ Although Gibbon was not the first to use to the term “mosaic” to describe Canada’s cultural mix (as opposed to the American “melting pot” at the time), he did popularize it. Gibbon went on to publish, in 1935, the very influential book Canadian Mosaic, mainstreaming the term and the idea for the next few generations.

There were, of course, some glaring problems with Gibbon’s rosy interpretation of what it meant to be Canadian. His “cultural mosaic” was still built on white, Anglo-Celt (male) hegemony: ²⁹ First Nations people, for example, were all but ignored except as idealized, romantic figures of a by-gone era, while non-white groups were equally bypassed. There is quite a lot to critique about how this cultural mosaic was conceptualized – who was included and in what way – but in helping to present different disparate groups as he did, in celebrating their unique clothes and music and traditions, Gibbon helped to introduce people living in Canada to each other, and to themselves, as Canadians. That’s no small accomplishment!

This all also helps to explain how the opening ceremonies at the David Thompson Memorial Fort in Invermere, which Gibbon had a hand in, featured both costume contests for First Nations participants, and French Canadian dances.

Through all of this, Gibbon’s own romantic bent continually shone through, tied together with his own love for the outdoors. In 1923, Gibbon and Walter Nixon got snowed in their tent on a trail riding trip near Tumbling Glacier in Kootenay National Park. During this unexpected entrapment, Gibbon conceived of the idea of the Trail Riders of the Canadian Rockies, a social group aimed at encouraging travel through the Canadian Rockies by horseback, and the love of outdoor life.

The annual ride of the Trail Riders featured costumes and sing-alongs, and lists were published of members as they reached particular milestones in terms of distance travelled via horseback. There was certainly some unhelpful romanticism to the Trail Riders – the group idealized “the customs of the Indians” in a very noble savage sort of way –³⁰ but the order also encouraged individuals to travel through the mountains who otherwise may not have done. A decade after its formation, the group had “thousands of members in almost every country of the globe.”³¹

Safe to say, given that this is only a brief overview of J.M. Gibbon’s work, that he was a bit of a workaholic. He and his wife had four children (Murray, John, Faith and Phillip), but Gibbon himself spent much of his time and efforts dedicated to work rather than family. Still, for two months every summer Gibbon installed himself at the Banff Springs Hotel, from where he could comfortably oversee the CPR’s summer operations, and he could jump across the mountains to his family’s summer home, christened “Toby Lodge”, on his CVIF property.³² For an interesting and thinly veiled read on Gibbon’s impressions of the valley, check out his non fiction work The Conquering Hero – names are changed, but “The Valley” appears as an influential feature.

Gibbon stayed with the CPR until his retirement, in summer 1945.³³ He passed away in Montréal on 2 July 1952.

The Gibbon Legacy

Gibbon’s CVIF property changed somewhat over the years, with title being turned over to his wife, Anne Gibbon, by the early 1920s. The Gibbon family home, Toby Lodge, was likely constructed at the top of the hill on Lot 27. The initial lot, Lot 10, was also subdivided in 1921, with the northern half going to Henry Hugh Peters. The Gibbons sold the property, then being operated as a dairy ranch, in 1948 to Ben Bennett. The Gibbon summer home later burnt down, possibly sometime in the 1970s.³⁴

The name Gibbon Pass, after John Murray Gibbon, was seemingly put forward in 1929,³⁵ and approved by the Canadian Geographical Society at the beginning of 1930 (this sequence is somewhat confusing: a 1929 article mentions a “Mount Gibbon” being named in the Rockies, but I could find no such mountain, so I assume this actually referred to the pass). The pass was reportedly “discovered by Mr Gibbon when he was planning the route to be taken by the Trail Riders last summer.”³⁶ (The word “discovered” seems a probable exaggeration here, with “popularized” likely being more apt).

One can still hike over Gibbon Pass, and it looks like an absolutely lovely area.

See Also

Wilmer
Invermere
Horsethief Creek
Thomas Starbird
David Thompson Memorial Fort
Walter Nixon

Footnotes